Current air-traffic communication systems, such as primary and secondary radars, multilateration systems, and Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) present several limitations. For example, these communication systems do not provide global coverage. Also, current communication systems are close to saturation. For instance, ADS-B uses a significant amount of resources, particularly in the 1090 MHz band, to transmit data to an airplane within an area of interest. As such, in some areas the 1090 MHz band may be reaching a data bandwidth limit.
As a result, current communication systems may be unable to manage the expected growth of air traffic density for the upcoming years. Of particular concern is the rising number of aircraft, including unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) that will make use of the communication systems.
New technologies are arising to deal with this air traffic density growth. One of these emerging technologies is Internet Protocol (IP)-based communication. Internet connectivity available onboard (“Internet onboard”) is a new development that provides global coverage for communications. Because this type of communication does not use traditional radio links (such as VHF or 1090 MHz), but instead relies on a satellite link to a wide area network (WAN), such as the Internet, the range of the system is not limited by the distance between emitter and receiver.
In a typical ADS-B system, relying on an IP-based communication link, an aircraft sends location data at a rate of twice per second. A ground-based server receives the location data, and sends back to the aircraft, information including location data of other airplanes located within a certain distance range of the aircraft. Currently, in order to determine the information to be sent back to each aircraft, the ground-based server needs to calculate the distance between every pair of registered aircraft. This means that, because there are around twenty thousand concurrent flights worldwide, for each cycle (0.5 seconds) the server has to compute around 400 million distances between aircraft pairs. Because these calculations are trigonometry-based, the server may become overloaded, adding to the difficulty of the calculations.
Therefore, there is a need to reduce the amount of resources needed by the server to determine the information to be sent to each of the aircraft. Other disadvantages may exist.